After a few days off, we are back from our mini-vacation. When we left, it seemed as though things were finally settling down regarding Absolute Poker, and that maybe the focus would start shifting to more positive news stories in the online poker world.

It seems as though Mark Seif, spokesperson for Absolute Poker, has been handling himself extremely poorly since the entire story broke. He basically threatened a lawsuit against Todd "Dan Druff" Witteles on Raw Vegas TV, even though Witteles was a victim of the Absolute Poker fraud and was one of the leading voices in getting this story out to the public. I followed this entire story very closely, and it seems to me that all Witteles did was ask that Seif produce the hand histories from a suspicious session that he had in February of 2006. Seif seemed to take this as some sort of a personal attack, and threatened a lawsuit against Todd Witteles. Witteles comes across to me as being extremely honest, intelligent and fair, and I have not read anything that Witteles wrote that would lead me to believe that he was accusing Seif of cheating.

Now, apparently, Absolute Poker have said that they deleted the hand histories from the session in doubt involving Mr. Seif. Many, including myself, find this incredible and almost impossible. How a major poker room such as Absolute Poker could not produce a hand history from just over a year and a half ago is beyond me. Hard drives don't cost THAT much money. Can you imagine Pokerstars or Full Tilt Poker saying that they couldn't produce a hand history because it had been deleted? I guarantee you that both sites have the hand history of every hand played on their sites.

I've been away for a couple of days so I am just getting up to speed on this situation, but we'll have more on this in the near future.

The entire Absolute Poker situation had a major effect on our traffic in October. Including all of the sites in our gambling network, we had 94,613 unique visitors in October, with over 400,000 page views.

One of our articles regarding the Absolute Poker situation was Dugg and hit the front page of Digg.com, resulting in a massive surge in traffic. Luckily, our sites held in there for the most part, as we only had a ten minute period of so when our sites were down due to too many MySQL connections at the same time.

October was a very bad month in terms of newsflow for online poker. You had the Absolute Poker scandal, and the entire situation with "TheV0id" being disqualified as the winner of the WCOOP main event. We understand that Pokerstars is being sued. That is another story that we will be paying close attention to, though it may be hard to get any details.

In other news, there are some well-known names still left in the North American Poker Championship which will resume on Thursday. These names include Jeff "Actionjeff" Garza, Barry Greenstein, Adam "Roothlus" Levy and Jonathan "FieryJustice" Little. There are currently 18 players left in the tournament, and they will play down to the final 6 on Thursday, with the final table taking place on Friday.

One more note. Congratulations to Chris Vaughn, who took down back to back Sunday Million tournaments. First he took down the Full Tilt Poker Million Dollar Guaranteed tournament, and then the very next week he took down the Pokerstars Sunday Millions tournament. Undoubtedly one of the most impressive accomplishments ever in online poker. He plays under the alias of "BluffMagCV" on Full Tilt Poker and "SlippyJacks" on Pokerstars.